Clive Wilmer

Clive Wilmer has published five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Falls.

Poem: ‘After Pavese’

Clive Wilmer, 16 April 1981

The lone man hearkens to the calm voice, His expression ajar – as if the draught On his face were a breath, a friendly breath, Returning, beyond belief, from time gone by.

The lone man hearkens to the ancient voice His fathers throughout the ages have heard, clear And composed, a voice that much like the green Of the pools and hills deepens at evening.

The lone man knows a voice of...

Two Poems

Clive Wilmer, 5 June 1986

Post-War Childhoods

For Takeshi Kusafuka

If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

You, born in Tokyo In nineteen forty-four, Knew the simplicity Occasioned by a war. In London it was so Even in victory – In defeat, how much more.

Knew it I say – and yet, Born to it, you and I, How could we in truth have...

Poem: ‘The Earth Rising’

Clive Wilmer, 23 October 1986

The men who first set foot on the bleached waste That is the moon saw rising near in space A planetary oasis that surpassed The homesick longings of their voyaging race:

Emerald and ultramarine through a white haze Like a torn veil – as if no sand or dust Or stain of spilt blood or invading rust Corrupted it with reds, browns, yellows, greys.

So visionaries have seen it: to design...

Letter

Vendlerising

2 April 1987

SIR: A question for your readers. What do the following poets have in common: R.L. Barth, Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis, N. Scott Momaday, John Peck, Timothy Steele and Alan Stephens? I can think of four answers. All of them have spent at least part of their lives in California. All of them at one time or another have been nourished on the poetry and teaching of Yvor Winters. All of them...
Letter

Their Witness

27 February 1992

In dismissing my view of the Hughes/Csokits versions of Janos Pilinszky (Letters, 11 June), Daniel Weissbort appears to identify it with what he describes as ‘mimetic translation in which the reproduction of the original metre and rhyme pattern is taken to be a sine qua non of responsible translation’. As Weissbort must be aware, since he has published several of my translations, this is not and...

An apple is an apple: György Petri

August Kleinzahler, 19 July 2001

György Petri (or Petri György, as he would have been called in Hungary) was born in Budapest in 1943 to a family with a Serbian and Jewish background. A year after Petri’s birth,...

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Cambridge Theatre

Donald Davie, 19 August 1982

Sue Lenier’s poems occupy 70 closely printed pages, of which I have read – the things I do for LRB! – 50 or so. If ‘read’ is the word for what one does, or can do,...

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